Friday, April 18, 2008
Graders' Preferences
Wednesday's discussion about how different classes have different expectations and constraints on writing assignments got me thinking about whether I change my writing style to satisfy the professor or TA to get a better grade. I remember last year I took a Bacteriology lab course (304, some of you guys might have taken it too) and we had to turn in two reports over the course of the semester. I wanted to get a good grade and I must've referred to the grading rubric more than a dozen times to make the report exactly how the instructors wanted it. There were a few different instructors for the class and one of the instructors who was also the class coordinator answered everyone's questions about the report on learn at uw. I remember doing exactly as he told us to do and got some points docked off because I had a different instructor and he graded it a bit differently. That's one example of how depending on the grader, the same paper may receive different grades. I think biases/preferences are inevitable in the world we live in (not just with grades) so whether we like it or not, we'll have to conform to the standards or rules of the person with the power (in this case the grader) if we want a good grade. As a side note, I thought that it was nice to have a specific rubric for grading because that made it easier to know what the instructors were looking for in the report as opposed to a writing assignment with so few constraints that you're not even sure what the graders want.
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2 comments:
Man that sucks. I wonder also if there is a correlation here. My notion is that some of the smartest people in english oriented fields can get rid of those biases and I have noticed that. They understand the realms in which people write and also that even though it may not fit their schema of what the paper should be like, they grade fairly. Even though a teacher may be very intelligent in the field of Bacteriology, it shows his/her lack of overall intelligence in other areas. I am a fincance and investments major, but I understand the realms in which students write. I do believe their should be boundaries, but docking points off a paper because it doesn't fit their schema is wrong and an inconsistent part of our education.
Man, I have no problem changing my writing style, or even the contents of what I'm writing to get a better grade. I figure that as long as the point of what I'm writing is to get a good grade, it wouldn't be an economical decision to do otherwise, even if I don't agree/like what I'm writing about, and feel that it's a worse piece of work because of it.
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